Though Decoud was named by his social role ("the lover of Antonia") for his bodily death, he receives his true name for his disappearance "without a trace," suggesting that the true meaning of death is really a vanishing -- a disappearance of the inner, subjective personality from the world. See "the truth which every death takes out of the world." He is referred to here as "brilliant," this time clearly by the narrator rather than his parents , subtly expressing the recurring symbolism in which the inner soul is expressed in terms of light emitted from a person.

There is a deeper meaning, however, to the two stages of Decoud's death. Note that the pistol and the ingots serve different purposes (either would have done the job alone), with the stressedly symbolic silver associated not with bodily death but with the erasure of the self from the world "without a trace." This suggests the final implosion of skepticism, the philosophy of negation, whose ultimate desire is the negation of desire, and thus the vanishing of the self. It is indeed what the narrator calls it later, a "self-destructive passion" , and if it confers knowledge of the true world, it does so at the cost of knowledge of the true self.